Gregory Crouch recently released the book "The Bonanza King: John Mackay and The Battle Over the Greatest Riches in The American West", published by Scribner. Crouch's new book is the epic rags-to-riches frontier tale of John Mackay, an Irish immigrant who outwitted, outworked, and out-maneuvered thousands of rivals to take control of Nevada's Comstock Lode, the rich body of gold and silver so immensely valuable—equivalent to more than $600 billion today—that it changed the destiny of the United States.
Mackay was a destitute Irish immigrant brought to this country when he was 9 years old, in 1840. He grew up in New York City's Five Points slum (the "Gangs of New York" neighborhood), came of age amid the violent mayhem of the California Gold Rush, and rose to the full power of manhood in the deep, rich, and outrageously dangerous mines of the Comstock Lode beneath Virginia City, Nevada, the ultimate Old West boomtown.
On the Comstock, Mackay worked his way up from nothing, battling the pernicious "Bank Ring" of California capitalists who'd monopolized the lode, and struck the legendary Big Bonanza, a stupendously valuable body of gold and silver ore buried 1,500 feet below the center of the town. The extraordinary wealth Mackay extracted from the Comstock Lode drove wild stock market frenzies in San Francisco and launched his wife, whose beginnings were every bit as humble as his own, on a meteoric social career among the finest European aristocrats. When John Mackay died in 1902—with a personal fortune equivalent to about $50 billion modern dollars—front page obituaries all over Europe and the United States hailed him as one of the most widely admired Americans of the age.
The Wall Street Journal's recent review described "The Bonanza King" as "A monumentally researched biography of one of the 19th century's wealthiest self-made Americans... Well-written and worthwhile... John Mackay spent a lifetime defying odds."